


liminality

by waywarddays



Series: folks in their twenties with umbrellas [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV), The Umbrella Academy (TV) RPF
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Loss of Trust, Reader Needs a Hug, They all need hugs, Trust Issues, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26330062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waywarddays/pseuds/waywarddays
Summary: Vanya Hargreeves leaves your house. Eight hours later, you're planning to rescue her from two Commission assassins with the aid of her deranged, also-assassin brother.You find all this out by text.ORYou realise that though you love Vanya, you don't know anything about her, really. Not at all.
Relationships: Vanya Hargreeves/Reader
Series: folks in their twenties with umbrellas [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907551
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	liminality

“Vanya—?”

The door fell open beneath the weight of your arm, and you were standing in a crumpled-looking hotel room, the sort with tea-stained walls and popcorn ceilings, staring down at the person you had come to love as she drew breath through a mouthful of blood.

There was popping behind you, the low distant call of a fight, but it was so long away from you now that when you knelt it was as if it receded, like you had ducked underneath it and, thrown off the scent, the battle had left the pair of you alone on the mucky carpet, where she was wedged in the sliver of space between the two single beds, still unmade. The dark was enclosing but it permitted smell. The air shuddered with blood.

And you could have done it, really, then and there — you could have let that anger, the seething, unobscured type which seemed to befall you so often these days, you could have let it swell to the burning point inside you, and you could have set the building on fire, carried her out in your pair of arms, set her down on the cold concrete to let the wind and fresh air begin to heal her. 

Instead, you pressed a thumb and two fingers to her forehead, and underneath your touch, despite the striking clarity of your situation, she stirred, bloodied, but in the end safe.

“Hey,” She said to you, voice croaky. One eye had been beaten shut and the other was open only a fraction. “I’m sorry. I got caught.”

“It’s fine, Vanya,” You said back. “It’s fine.”

And it wasn’t — it wasn’t, not even later, when you were half-supporting her, walking back to the car Diego had stolen to get the group of you here in — not even when Klaus sat in the back, yelling profanities at Ben, and Five, desperate not to look concerned, tossed a look or two over his shoulder at where you were curled around her in the backseat — but it would have to do for now. Glimmering somewhere distantly, the sun was coming up, and the day, though it had begun so early — too soon, really — was beginning to crest with light.

The snaking gold in it followed you home.

—

It had been twenty-six hours since you’d last seen her. You knew because Klaus had sent a text.

To: (y/n) 🐉🐲🔥

From: 👻 ghoul boy 👻

‘vanya’s in trouble. academy @ five’

A text. And that was all it had said. 

You were gone so quickly from your apartment that on your way back to the Academy from the raid, you’d gotten a text from your next-door-neighbour to say she’d needed to lock the house up for you with the spare key because you’d left your door half-open, in the middle of the night, in a ruddy-looking apartment building at the centre of New York City. If anything, you were lucky your cat had stayed put.

When you’d received it, you’d been sitting nearest the couch’s armrest, reading in the mid-autumn sun. A little dazed, you looked up at your table, at the twin mugs of half-drunk hot chocolate and the crumby plates you hadn’t yet cleared up from breakfast. That had been a little over eight hours ago, after you’d treated each other to a lazy morning in and woken up, in a twist that was half-pleasant and half-making your arm dead, slung over one another on the fold-out you always prepared for Vanya when she came over (the same one, evidently, she never seemed to actually use).

It had begun at your Arts College, when you’d stumbled in on her playing violin for a classmate of yours, having walked in the throes of post-essay-cram exhaustion into the wrong room, and had unfurled quickly from there; your relationship had been tentative, and then too dependent, and had finally in the last few months, after a good number of strongly-worded arguments and a fair share of broken plates that had dropped after levitating, become something fruitful and pretty.

You knew all about Vanya, you’d thought: about Leonard and the pills; about her jackass of a father; about her siblings, about the axe-wielding, teleporting psychopaths and the one who’d fought at Vietnam; even about her childhood lock-up cell.

You remembered the day she’d shown that to you, hazy-eyed and quiet. Standing at its centre, you’d practiced breathing with her. She showed you all of it — the little scratches in the cement flooring she’d made using a knitting needle, the crude illustrations of a six-year-old — and she’d expected you, looking back on it, to leave, because that had been all she’d known.   
But of course you hadn’t. You’d sat together, back-to-back on the floor, and talked about all of it, and when you felt she was done, you wrapped her up in a hug, and she, sniffling (but grinning, though, smiling so hard and so wide all at once, so that you felt it in the skin of your shoulder), had let it happen.

You thought about that as you reached for the doorknob, forgetting your purse and your keys and to feed your cat, and thought that actually, you really didn’t know her at all.

—

“So, plan,” Five had said when you’d pushed your way into the Academy, almost taking Diego out from where he was curled against the wall behind the great wooden entrance doors. He’d glared at you, but you’d ignored it, and Five, critically efficient at the best of times, got straight down to business. For that, you couldn’t have been more grateful.

“You two—” He gestured to Klaus and Diego. “—are scoping the perimeter. Keep watch of the house. We don’t know if this is a rouse to get us out so that they can root through the Academy to find information. Allison, Luther,” He gestured quickly. “Guard the entrance. Make sure that if they manage to get out from under us, you rumour them or you punch them. Whichever’s quickest.”

He turned to you, a little breathless, a little wild-eyed. “We’re going in to find Vanya. Okay?”

You caught the keys he tossed to you, golden-eyed. The hair on the back of your neck had come up, and a strange, floaty sort of unpleasantness hung around in your stomach, making you ill and nerveless at the same time.

“I’ll drive.”

You’d dropped Luther and Allison outside your destination — at the gates of a rundown-looking carpark, the motel in question looming upwards in thin, Soviet-like fashion up ahead — before you’d asked the question, your heart numb in the vast place of your chest.

“Who got her?” You pressed quietly, swinging into a messy park before swinging both legs out and standing up. The awkward driving position had given you a crick in the back of your neck, but you wouldn’t notice it until hours later, when the seven of you were home again. Five pushed his way out after you and stared at you, calculatingly, over the hood of the car.

He turned forward, looking up at the three levels of blue-curtained rooms ahead of you. “Commission,” He said, and your mouth soured. It had been the answer you’d expected — because really, who else had interest in some random twenty-year-old violinist, ostensibly with no powers — but not the one you’d wanted. It left a white-hot sort of desecration inside you, like you were crumbling but from the inside first. “It’s Room 541.”

You headed up the stairs in tense silence, and for once, Five tailed behind you. You could feel him watching the back of your neck.

Eventually, coming up on the 500s, you said through the blockade of your teeth, “Timeline’s okay if I kill them?”

“Not really,” He said casually, finally falling into step next to you. He’d conjured an axe from somewhere, and you wondered when that’d become his signature weapon because you hadn’t even questioned it. “But it’s fine. If you don’t, I will.”

—

“Well, what a fantastic version of events this is!” 

You winced as you set Vanya down, with Luther’s help (and a glare on your part — you still didn’t trust him, not after what Vanya had told him he’d done to her the first time around this apocalyptic merry-go-round), on her bedspread. Five eyed her, filling a syringe with a clear liquid, and winced.

“I’m thinking,” Klaus said from his position on her windowsill, tossing his hair back flippantly, “that Vanya got kidnapped, okay, not so lucky; and she also got hurt which, hey, not so good either; but all that happened, and she’s alive, and will be alive for the foreseeable future, and we got her back basically an hour or two after we lost her.”

“Your conclusion?” Diego entertained flatly. For all his flaws, both as a brother and as a person, he knew how to deal with Klaus when no one else could. His voice broke the tension that comment had caused and you and Five went about tending to Vanya with a sense of ease, as though the very fact that the banter was happening at all signalled that she’d be okay in the end.

“If all goes swimmingly from here, we should buy a lottery ticket.”

“Klaus,” Five warned. He shut up.

You watched Five work in terse silence. The rest of the room’s worth of people filed out eventually — Klaus was the last to go, peering over the edge of the bed in what was, to his credit, genuine concern, if a little misrepresented — but the pair of you stayed, either side of her, doing what you could for her. Vanya was in and out of consciousness, though she was in good enough spirits to complain if Five missed a vein with a needle, so you took it that she’d be okay in the end, and something vile and tenacious, a tension like a snake, left you in the half-quiet of your girlfriend’s bedroom.

“They beat her pretty badly,” Five said, in that way that he often did, when he was testing to see what someone’s reaction would be. It struck you, deeply, that for the amount of good this family had done, saving the world and saving the world again and introducing you to Vanya as a direct result, there was a part of you which hated them for the things they couldn’t control, that endless sense of morbid curiosity their father’s neglect had instilled in them. You saw it the least in Vanya, but the rest of them could be ridiculous with it — it sometimes felt when you walked in as though each step was a test, each decision somehow telling them about something personal and guarded and unfortunate you hadn’t wanted to share about yourself. 

Anger swelled inside you. Behind you, the fireplace burst into flames.

Five blinked at it, then down at you, then settled back to his work.

And there it was. The end of the test.

“(y/n)?” Vanya managed. Her throat sounded destroyed, and you hoped to god that these two assholes — Hazel and Cha-Cha, you’d been told — had been giving her enough water, even if they were torturing her. The urge to kill them rose up in you again until you realised that you and Five had already done that.

You relaxed as best you could, and squeezed her hand to let her know you were there. Satisfied, it seemed, she drifted back to sleep; and it did seem to be sleep, not unconsciousness, that claimed her this time. 

You’d done what you could. The blood was on your clothes.

And yet you were still furious.

“What happened, just before she left your apartment?” Five asked. There was a suspicious lilt to his tone. 

Vanya had wanted to keep your relationship a secret from the rest of her family, and you had done your best, even as you were introduced to them one by one as ‘a friend’ rather ambiguously, to hold true to her wishes. You got the sense that it wasn’t a problem like she wouldn’t be accepted, considering she’d told you about the incident with that 60s woman — Sissy, you thought distantly, and wondered if that was wrong — and Klaus’ stint with his soldier boyfriend, but more like she’d need to do some explaining about herself that she didn’t want to do. You often got the feeling with the Hargreeves siblings that they were both obliged to talk about themselves to one another and hated it from some profound part of themselves, and that, among other things, was why they seemed to fight so much.

Still, though, Five definitely knew. Vanya had commented to you once, in passing, as a joke, that he knew everything — and, looking at him as he looked at you, sort of strangely, less like he was observing you and more like he was unpicking you, you believed her.

“She slept over,” You admitted quietly. “We had breakfast.”

“That was the last thing you did?”

You nodded, clasping your spare hand over the one of hers you’d already been grasping onto. “Yes.”

“Then she probably didn’t know.” He said nonchalantly, setting the syringe down at her side and dragging the small bedside table-full of medical instruments away from Vanya’s head. It clattered, rattling along the gaps in the panelled floor, and you feared she’d wake up, but she didn’t. Perhaps she had actually fainted again. “About the fact she was in danger, I mean. She probably didn’t know when she left that someone was after her.”

You laughed humourlessly and bowed your head over Vanya’s arm, where she’d outstretched it towards you in her sleep. The exhaustion in it all, the panic, it had destroyed you, and you leant over her even as Five stepped away, uncertain of what to do in this very human space. 

“Vanya knows it all,” You said bitterly, suddenly, desperately, inconsolable. “Everything.”

**Author's Note:**

> Been feeling Vanya lately. I think it would be very difficult to be in love with any of the Hargreeves kids, especially the one who almost caused the end of the world (twice). 
> 
> If you like some Vanya hurt/comfort, maybe check out the work-in-progress I'm updating every other day (ish) that's also a part of this series. I'm very proud of the work I've done for her there and I'd love if you'd check it out!
> 
> I'll link my Kofi, where you can commission + request my writing, here: https://ko-fi.com/waywarddays. If you liked this and you have the means, please do consider donating! 🐤🌈 Watch this space for an update soon.


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